IATIS News

CALL FOR PROPOSALS TO HOST THE 9th IATIS CONFERENCE (2027) The International Association for Translation and Intercultural Studies (IATIS) has held 7 conferences so far: Seoul in 2001, Cape Town in 2006, Melbourne in 2009, Belfast in 2012, Belo Horizonte in 2015, Hong Kong in 2018, Barcelona 2021, and Oman in 2025. The organisation of the 8th IATIS Conference, to be held in Oman in December 2025, is now well underway, and already we are turning our attention to the 9th IATIS Conference, which is to be held in 2027. IATIS would thus like to invite those interested to prepare proposals to host the 2027 Conference following these guidelines.  Proposals to host the 2027 conference should be emailed to Dr Kyung Hye KIM, Chair of the IATIS Conference Committee, at kyunghye.kim@dgu.ac.kr to arrive no later than March 31st, 2025. Please put “IATIS 2027 Proposal” in the subject line. The IATIS Executive hopes to announce the venue for the 2027 IATIS Conference in Oman in December 2025. Details of previous conferences are available here  

This innovative collection explores the points of contact between translation practice and ecological culture by focusing on the relationship between ecology and translation. The volume’s point of departure is the idea that translations, like all human activities, have a relational basis. Since they depend on places and communities to which they are addressed as well as on the cultural environment which made them possible, they should be understood as situated cultural practices, governed by a particular political ecology. Through the analysis of phenomena that relate translation and ecological culture (such as the development of ecofeminism; the translation of texts on nature; translation in postcolonial contexts; the role of dialect and minority languages in literary translation and institutional language policies and the translation of texts on migration) the book offers interpretive models that contribute to the development of eco-translation. Th volume showcases a comparative and interdisciplinary approach to an emerging disciplinary field which has gained prominence at the start of the 21st century, and places special emphasis on the perspective of gender and linguistic diversity across a wide range of languages. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in translation studies, linguistics, communication, cultural studies, and environmental humanities. For more information, click here.

Accessible communication comprises all measures employed to reduce communication barriers in various situations and fields of activity. Disabilities, illnesses, different educational opportunities and/or major life events can result in vastly different requirements in terms of how texts or messages must be prepared in order to meet the individual needs and access conditions of the recipients of accessible communication. This handbook examines and critically reflects accessible communication in its interdisciplinary breadth. Current findings, proposed solutions and research desiderata are juxtaposed with reports from practitioners and users, who provide insights into how they deal with accessible communication and highlight current and future requirements and problems. For more information, click here.

Editors Adolfo M. García | Universidad de San Andrés / University of California / Universidad de Santiago de Chile Edinson Muñoz | Universidad de Santiago de Chile Néstor Singer | Universidad de Santiago de Chile For more information, click here.

Full article available here.

The programme for the Translab4: Translation and Labour-symposium has been announced. The symposium is organized by Alexa Alfer and Cornelia Zwischenberger and will be held at the University of Westminster, London, UK, on July, 6-7. Interested participants are kindly asked to register until 23 June 2023. Further information: https://transcultcom.univie.ac.at/translab4/

This is the first handbook to focus on translation theory, based on an innovative and expanded definition of translation and on the newest perspectives in the field of Translation Studies. With an introductory overview explaining the rationale, a part on foundational issues and three further parts on object translation, representamen translation and interpretant translation, the handbook provides a critical overview of conceptual approaches to translation which can contribute to our understanding of translational phenomena in the broadest sense. Authored by leading international figures, the handbook covers a wide range of theories and approaches from ecological and biosemiotic approaches to philosophical and cultural approaches, and from computational sciences to anthropology. The Routledge Handbook of Translation Theory and Concepts is both an essential reference guide for advanced students, researchers and scholars in translation and interpreting studies, and it is an enlightening guide to future developments in the field. For more information, click here.

This innovative book takes the concept of translation beyond its traditional boundaries, adding to the growing body of literature which challenges the idea of translation as a primarily linguistic transfer. To gain a fresh perspective on the work of translation in the complex processes of meaning-making across physical, social and cultural domains (conceptualized as translationality), Piotr Blumczynski revisits one of the earliest and most fundamental senses of translation: corporeal transfer. His study of translated religious officials and translated relics reframes our understanding of translation as a process creating a sense of connection with another time, place, object or person. He argues that a promise of translationality animates a broad spectrum of cultural, artistic and commercial endeavours: it is invoked, for example, in museum exhibitions, art galleries, celebrity endorsements, and the manufacturing of musical instruments. Translationality offers a way to reimagine the dynamic entanglements of matter and meaning, space and time, past and present. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in translation studies as well as related disciplines such as the history of religion, anthropology of art, and material culture. For more information, click here.

The contributions in this volume are a reflection of the entire range of Interpreting Studies, from explorations of research methodology and interpreting quality research to public service interpreting today and in the past, risk management strategies in court interpreting, and the interdependencies of interpreters in project networks. They address questions such as who can be called an interpreter, present new approaches to interpreter education, and discuss advances in technology, both in terms of speech-to-text interpreting and the changes that the Covid-19 pandemic has brought to the lives of interpreters. The breadth of this volume’s topics reflects the oeuvre of Franz Pöchhacker, who has left his mark on Interpreting Studies over more than three decades. This tribute not only reflects the many strands of his work, but also offers new research and insights by established scholars and young researchers in the ever growing field of Interpreting Studies. For more information, click here

The registration to Translab4 is now open. The two-day symposium organized by Cornelia Zwischenberger and Alexa Alfer held at the University of Westminster, London, UK and will be focusing on the concept of ‘labour’ arising from Translab’s hallmark blending of ‘translation’ and ‘collaboration’. Register now and find more information under: https://transcultcom.univie.ac.at/translab4/

Two-day symposium organized by Alexa Alfer and Cornelia Zwischenberger, held 6-7th July 2023 in London, UK This symposium will be devoted to explorations of the concept of labour arising from Translab’s hallmark blending of ‘translation’ and ‘collaboration’. It posits that the concept of labour, as distinct from ‘work’ (Arendt 1958/1998; Narotzky 2018), warrants more sustained engagement on the part of both Translation Studies and the translation profession. While digital labour (Fuchs 2020), playbor (Kücklich 2005), fan labour (De Kosnik 2012), affective labour (Hardt 1999; Koskinen 2020), emotional labour (Hochschild 1993), or (im)material labour (Negri & Hardt 2004) may present themselves as particularly topical sites for such exploration, both labour and work are also important yet largely underarticulated dimensions in discussions about translation in a professional context and in debates about the distinction between professional and non-professional translation. Last but not least, we are keen to extend consideration of the labour concept to translation as such, and to interrogate its relevance to current debates about the translation concept. While the concept of work is perhaps more readily associated with translation in professional discourses at least, translation as labour, i.e. as an activity structurally embedded in capitalist chains of surplus-value production (Zwischenberger and Alfer 2022), features far less prominently in current debates. However, foregrounding labour as a fundamental dimension of translation (and, for that matter, interpreting) allows both researchers and practitioners to investigate translation and interpreting more closely from a socioeconomic perspective. This should, in turn, help develop impactful alternatives to the prevalent ‘professionalisation’ discourses intended to raise the socio-economic status of translators, and critique the ways in which many of these discourses create idealised narratives of translation and interpreting that tend to foreground the processes of work while masking the labour involved in producing outputs whose value is, quietly or overtly, appropriated by those with a stake in the means of their production. Shining a spotlight on the surplus-value inherent in translation as the commodifiable expansion of a source text thus also uncovers the translation concept itself as the site of an unarticulated and unresolved tension between two competing and converging cultural narratives that pivot on conceptions of value as, on the one hand, inextricably bound to and, on the other, posited firmly “outside of a profit-motivated relationship” (Fayard 2021, 216). Papers are to be submitted by 18 April 2023.  For more information, click here.

The South East European Research Centre invites applications for studying towards a PhD degree of the University of York, through the Doctoral Programme of SEERC. The deadline for applying is April 21, 2023.  Details concerning the available research topics and the application submission process can be found in the Call for Applications. A small number of fee waiver studentships will become available to qualifying candidates who will apply for full time studies only. For more information, click here